Op-Ed Contributor

When the Games Were Everything

Published: August 9, 2004

(Page 2 of 2)

The last sentence is quietly ominous. The tides through which we move - the highs and the lows, the peaks and the troughs - tell us repeatedly that nothing lasts and that all life ends in death. Let us temper our excitement and agitation, whether for the ecstasy of battle or the ecstasy of sex, whether over great achievement or great loss, and admit to ourselves that all things have their moment and are gone. In such high-minded resignation lie the aristocratic origins of sportsmanship.

Once Rome overwhelmed the Greeks in the second century B.C., the Romans had to be invited to the games. The Emperor Nero, history's most famous spoiled brat, proved himself a very bad sport by insisting that the Olympics be rescheduled so he could attend, and then demanding first prize for every event he entered. The lower orders of Greco-Roman society were never invited to participate in athletic competitions, nor were the unthinkable barbarians who lived their brutish lives beyond the borders of the Empire. But the Olympics and similar Panhellenic games nevertheless always had a heady internationalism about them, for they welcomed representatives from all over the known world - so long as they could speak Greek.

Once the Christian church came to influence the Roman political establishment, however, Greek paganism - the prayers to the gods, the fierceness of the games, the nudity, the sexual shamelessness - was trounced, and disappeared underground by the sixth century A.D. But as with most human artifices, its spirit never died out completely. It was still there to be resurrected in the Renaissance and exploited once more in the Enlightenment.

It was the outer wave of the Enlightenment that brought the Olympics back to Greek shores when the International Olympic Committee was formed and the modern games were established at Athens in 1896. This was largely thanks to the vision of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a stylish, relentless, enlightened Frenchman with a profound appreciation for what the ancient Greeks had accomplished, as well as very Judeo-Christian hopes for world peace and international cooperation.

Being a baron and a 19th-century male, Coubertin failed to perceive the perniciousness of European classism and universal sexism, so invitations to participate in the first modern Olympics were issued to "gentlemen" only. But a young Greek shepherd named Spyridon Louis, who was allowed on the Greek team at the last minute, won the first modern marathon. Afterwards, he turned down all honors - gold, cash, jewelry, free meals, free haircuts, free coffee for life - that the ecstatic Greeks pressed on him, even an offer of marriage from an aristocratic beauty, who in offering herself before the race to the winner-to-be had presumed that only a member of her own class could win. The modest winner accepted the olive wreath that was his due, returned to his little village of Marousi, and married his sweetheart.

This startling crack in the class barrier presaged the I.O.C.'s tearing down of other culturally determined barriers, including gender. Nor has Spyridon Louis been forgotten: the new Olympic stadium at Athens is named for him, and "to do a Louis" - to carry the day so unexpectedly - has become part of the Greek language.

We in the West are Greco-Roman Judeo-Christians, the inheritors of a double tradition that has had incalculable effect on the entire world. We are in a position to pick and choose from the abundant variety of our shared past. We hardly need to imitate ancient Greek bellicosity, racism, classism and sexism, or to laud the supreme worth ancient Greece placed on domination. (Actually, there are not a few among us who continue to admire just such things, but our society as a whole no longer pays special lip service to these values.)

But we must remain exceedingly grateful to the Greeks for introducing us to the peaceful uses of competition and the thrilling experiences made possible by organized athletics, not least of which is the sense of human solidarity that comes to bind athletes from so many different places to one another and also gives the immense Olympic audience an abiding feeling for the interconnectedness of the human family.

Finally, there is tremendous ecumenical value in humanity's abandoning its daily preoccupations and spending a couple of weeks riveted on a cooperative world of physical grace and human perfectibility: all that one can win by his own - or her own - feet and hands.

Thomas Cahill is the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization'' and, most recently, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter."